April 8, 2008

Good Question: “How Did We Reach the Point Where Air America Calls Hillary a ‘Whore’?”

She shouldn’t have been suspended. She should have been fired.

And, nope, it’s not because Rhodes is an Obama supporter, and I’m not. When Rhodes turned her show into an Obama-Love Hillary-Hate fest, I stopped listening. That’s what I do when a celebrity starts doing or saying something I don’t like: I stop supporting them, which, when enough of us do the same thing, sends the clearest message of all. I think Terminator 2: Judgment Day is one of the coolest movies ever, but since Arnold Schwarzenegger opened his big yap and started denigrating Democrats as “girlie men” — and then proceeded to deny us gay folks the right to get married (twice), and has turned California’s once-vibrant economy into that of a third-world nation, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera — I have withdrawn my monetary support from him by abstaining from the purchase of any product with his name on it.

When Randi Rhodes starting drinking the Kool-Aid by the gallon — and vomiting it back, in tenfold volume, over the airwaves — I turned her off. In fact, I turned off Air America Radio altogether; I changed the pre-set button on the car radio to something else… a Spanish-language station, I think. I don’t really listen to it — I don’t speak enough Spanish to understand much — but it was important to get Air America off my car radio, and I didn’t particularly care what replaced it, as long as it wasn’t a Christian station.

Mind you, I rather enjoy listening to the most fire-breathing Christian talk stations from time to time — the end-of-times soothsayers make for especially surreal entertainment — but if I actually left one of those nutball stations pre-set, it would be just my luck that the next mechanic who worked on the car would flip the radio on while he was working, hear Rev. Apocalyptus McFreaky spouting dire warnings of boil-covered frogs from the sky, and would think I was some sort of whackjob myself.

Ironically, that’s pretty much the reason I felt compelled to take Air America off the pre-set button: I’ve become quite embarrassed about any association with people and institutions which which I was once very proud to be allied. I’d hate to think my auto mechanic — or anyone else — would assume I must agree with the maniacal ravings of Randi Rhodes.

Sadly, I used to love Randi. But she’s come to represent the worst of— well, everything the Right has demonized the Left as: a bunch of wild-eyed radicals who hate, and spew the most toxic vitriol at, everyone who disagrees with them.

As I’ve often said (and probably written more than a few times), I expect irrational hatred from the Right, and I expect it from the Left aimed at the Right — but I don’t expect it from one faction of the Left aimed at another faction of the Left.

Well, OK, I do expect it these days. I’m just not entirely accustomed to it yet.

Anyway, speaking of the right wing (and I was), I do read what the tighty righties have to say (as Sun-Tzu said, “Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer”), and I don’t like the truth in what they’re saying lately.

To wit: Yesterday, Mark Steyn (and you can’t get more right-wing than Mark Steyn) over at The National Review (and you really can’t get any more right-wing than The National Review) answered the question “How did we reach the point where Air America calls Hillary a ‘whore’?” thusly:

Indeed. Randi Rhodes agrees with Hillary Clinton and Geraldine Ferraro on everything — abortion, health care, climate change, you name it. Yet the first is “a f***ing whore” and the second is “David Duke in drag” merely because they disagree on which Democratic senator would make the best president. The people applying these deranged epithets to the Clintons are in large part the very same people who spent the Nineties applying equally deranged epithets to anyone who disagreed with the Clintons.

There’s something rather heartening about this for those of us on the right who’ve been on the receiving end of the left’s vehemence: Apparently there really is nothing personal about it. You can be a chickenhawk warmonger racist homophobe mysogynist Bush shill or a pro-feminist pro-gay pro-black icon of progressive politics for a generation, but, if you cross the likes of Randi Rhodes, you’re all the same and you merit the same four-letter words and KKK slurs. The left’s Discoursometer is like one of those shower units where the slightest nudge turns it to scalding.

Ouch.

The only point with which I can reasonably disagree is that the “people applying these deranged epithets to the Clintons are in large part the very same people who spent the Nineties applying equally deranged epithets to anyone who disagreed with the Clintons.” Some are, to be sure. But a great many are not; for a great many of Obama’s “movement,” this is their first election, indeed their first foray into politics at all.

The screams of “You’re so done! Get out of the way!” you hear from the Obama camp are not only directed at Hillary, you know. Why do you think Obama himself dismisses the political activism — and activists themselves — of the 1960s?

Yes, partly because he himself is so detached from the 1960s — and not due to his age; as I’ve often noted, he is exactly my age, and I am quite beholden to the peaceniks and feminists and gay “lib” activists who came before me. But I have perspective Obama does not, and can never have; as I wrote in January:

[Neither Obama nor I] can recall the Civil Rights era as clearly as our elders (Obama and I were both two-going-on-three in 1964), yet I, at least, remember dim news images of firehoses in the streets of Birmingham, and attack dogs unleashed — and, much more clearly, my first, timid step approaching a black child at a playground. While I didn’t understand what it was I understood, I understood there was a difference between us, and that there were some very bad people in this world who would be very angry about my playing with a black child (or, as we were taught was the proper word at the time, a Negro).

Despite his skin color versus mine, I am not at all convinced that Barack Obama’s ties to the Civil Rights era equate with mine; when my snow-white third-grade class was being introduced to our first black classmate, Obama was living in Indonesia. We both attended Catholic school — but somehow, I cannot imagine that young Barack was inundated by the issue of American race relations (on the news, in the movies, on the cover of newsweeklies, and in lengthy class discussions — yes, even before my age reached double digits) as I was.

The issue was all around me; no one my age was allowed to forget the vast divide between whites and blacks in the United States. Was Obama, insulated literally on the other side of the planet, as aware at the same tender age of the volatile schism between black and white “back home”?

I wasn’t quite four when the Watts riots exploded — and exploded with such repercussion that I remember them as well as I remember the endless news footage of the Vietnam War, and the nightly body count out of Southeast Asia.

Does Obama remember any of this? Did he even hear about it before he returned to the U.S. at the age of ten — when even the Summer of Love was a quickly-fading memory?

But the lack of vital cultural milestones is not the sole reason he marginalizes and discounts the Baby Boomers; he does it because it strikes the chord of unleashed rebellion in every angry youth — and we were all angry youths at one time or another, cocksure that we knew it all, that our parents’ generation was irrelevant, that they had screwed up the world, and we were the only ones who could save it.

Obama gives his supporters cohesiveness by using the most basic, classic technique employed by all “movements.” No, I won’t use the word “cult” — this time — although this technique is essential to cult unanimity: a group identity defined by a common enemy.

I’ll let Chris Hedges explain it; he’s talking about fascism vis-à-vis (fundamentalist) evangelical religious movements — but then, what is Obamania but an evangelical religious movement? And why do you think Obama employs the speech and manner of a tent revivalist?

Because it works.

Hedges introduces American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America with an excerpt from Umberto Eco’s 1995 essay, “Eternal Fascism: Fourteen Ways of Looking at a Blackshirt.” Substitute “Obama movement” for “nation,” and “Clinton supporters” for “Jews” (stop rolling your eyes and just do it) as you read point number seven:

[T]he only ones who can provide an identity to the nation are its enemies. Thus at the root of the Ur-Fascist psychology there is the obsession with a plot, possibly an international one. … But the plot must also come from the inside: Jews are usually the best target because they have the advantage of being at the same time inside and outside.

If you can’t see how that applies directly to what I’m writing about today, then either you have never seen a group of Obama supporters in action, or you are an Obama supporter.

Eco continues:

8. The followers must be humiliated by the ostentatious wealth and force of their enemies. When I was a boy I was taught to think of Englishmen as the five-meal people. They ate more frequently than the poor but sober Italians. Jews are rich and help each other through a secret web of mutual assistance. However, the followers of Ur-Fascism must also be convinced that they can overwhelm the enemies. Thus, by a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak.

That’s the Obama supporters’ war on Hillary Clinton — and Clinton supporters — in a nutshell.

From Eco’s starting point, Hedges explores the origins of religious fascism — in short, the sum is greater than its parts; diversity within the group is trumped by the common unifying theme of disillusion and despair and a desperate need for hope (it’s not lost on us that the mantra of the Obama campaign is “hope”) and certitude of deliverance — and anything that threatens the illusion of the force greater than the individual must be destroyed.

Noting (on page 32) that such movements by their very nature inevitably lead to a “collective suicide,” Hedges writes (pp. 35-36):

The pain, the dislocation, alienation, suffering and despair that led millions of Americans into the movement are real. Many Americans are striking back at a culture they blame for the debacle of their lives. … They speak of numbness, an inability to feel pain or joy or love, a vast emptiness, a frightening loneliness and loss of control. …

They have replaced the world that has failed them with a new, glorious world filled with prophets and mystical signs. They believe in a creator who performs miracles for them, speaks directly to them and guides their lives, as well as the destiny of America. They are utopians who have found rigid, clearly defined moral edicts, rights and wrongs, to guide them in life and in politics. And they are terrified of losing this new, mystical world of signs, wonders and moral certitude, of returning to the old world of despair. They see criticism of their belief system … as vicious attempts by Satan to lure them back into the morass. The split in America, rather than simply economic, is between those who embrace reason, who function in the real world of cause and effect, and those who, numbed by isolation and despair, now seek meaning in a mythical world of intuition, a world that is no longer reality-based, a world of magic.

Those in the movement now fight, fueled by the rage of the dispossessed, to crush and silence the reality-based world.

Later, on page 151, in discussing the ministry of Ohio megachurch pastor Russell Johnson, Hedges again hits on a chilling parallel to the common characteristics of the most fervent Obama supporters:

In rallies like those in Johnson’s Ohio tour, friends, neighbors, colleagues and family members who do not conform to the ideology are gradually dehumanized. …

This new, exclusive community fosters rigidity, conformity and intolerance. In this new binary world segments of the human race are disqualified from moral and ethical consideration. And because fundamentalist followers live in a binary universe, they are incapable of seeing others as anything more than inverted reflections of themselves. If they seek to destroy nonbelievers … then nonbelievers must be seeking to destroy them. …

When people come to believe that they are immune from evil, that there is no resemblance between themselves and those they define as the enemy, they will inevitably grow to embody the evil they claim to fight.

And there, friends, you have it: A longer, more detailed answer to the question: “How did we reach the point where Air America calls Hillary a ‘whore’?”

As Nietzsche said: “When you stare into the abyss the abyss stares back at you.”

Oh, and about Randi Rhodes: I guess I should explain why she should have been sacked instead of given a “time-out.”

The fans (or perhaps in this case I should use the word “fans” comes from: fanatics) rushing to her defense with cries of “Free speech!” are the ones missing the point.

Rhodes’ right to free speech was not violated. Rhodes’ right to free speech would not have been violated if Air America had fired her outright. Rhodes has every right to say anything she wants.

But Air America has every right to decide whether or not it wants to continue to pay her for saying anything she wants.

Businesses — smart businesses, at least — fire people who add nothing to the bottom line, or, worse, diminish the bottom line.

If Randi Rhodes’ childish, misogynistic name-calling were adding to the bottom line (or at least not diminishing it), Air America wouldn’t have even suspended her. So it’s reasonable to conclude that Rhodes is either adding nothing, or actively diminishing company revenue by her behavior.

I know her behavior well before the “whores” remark drove me away. Progressive radio being what is is today (that is, on life support since day one), Air America cannot afford to lose many more like me.

Rhodes’s “time-out” is a fair indication that Air America is losing, or is in danger of losing (measurable by the number of listener complaints) a lot more listeners like me.

And that’s the bottom line.

Posted by: Sapphocrat

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